Read David Lodge - Small World for Free Online

with bright yellow curls pushing a trolley piled high with plates of half-eaten food took it from the table. “Finished, love?” she said. “I don’t blame you. Not very nice, is it?”
    “Did you write your poem?” said Angelica.
    “I’ll let you read it tonight. You have to come to the top floor of Lucas Hall.”
    “Is that where your room is?”
    “No.”
    “Why then?”
    “You’ll see.”
    “A mystery.” Angelica smiled, wrinkling her nose. “I like a mystery.”
    “Ten o’clock on the top floor. The moon will be up by then.”
    “Are you sure this isn’t just an excuse for a romantic tryst?”
    “Well, you said your research topic was romance…”
    “And you thought you’d give me some more material? Alas, I’ve got too much already. I’ve read hundreds of romances. Classical romances and medieval romances, renaissance romances and modern romances. Heliodorus and Apuleius, Chrétien de Troyes and Malory, Ariosto and Spenser, Keats and Barbara Cartland. I don’t need any more data. What I need is a theory to explain it all.”
    “Theory?” Philip Swallow’s ears quivered under their silvery thatch, a few places further up the table. “That word brings out the Goering in me. When I hear it I reach for my revolver.”
    “Then you’re not going to like my lecture, Philip,” said Morris Zapp.
    In the event, not many people did like Morris Zapp’s lecture, and several members of the audience walked out before he had finished. Rupert Sutcliffe, obliged as chairman to sit facing the audience, assumed an aspect of glazed impassivity, but by imperceptible degrees the corners of his mouth turned down at more and more acute angles and his spectacles slid further and further down his nose as the discourse proceeded. Morris Zapp delivered it striding up and down the platform with his notes in one hand and a fat cigar in the other. “You see before you,” he began, “a man who once believed in the possibility of interpretation. That is, I thought that the goal of reading was to establish the meaning of texts. I used to be a Jane Austen man. I think I can say in all modesty I was the Jane Austen man. I wrote five books on Jane Austen, every one of which was trying to establish what her novels meant—and, naturally, to prove that no one had properly understood what they meant before. Then I began a commentary on the works of Jane Austen, the aim of which was to be utterly exhaustive, to examine the novels from every conceivable angle—historical, biographical, rhetorical, mythical, structural, Freudian, Jungian, Marxist, existentialist, Christian, allegorical, ethical, phenomenological, archetypal, you name it. So that when each commentary was written, there would be nothing further to say about the novel in question.
    “Of course, I never finished it. The project was not so much Utopian as self-defeating. By that I don’t just mean that if successful it would have eventually put us all out of business. I mean that it couldn’t succeed because it isn’t possible, and it isn’t possible because of the nature of language itself, in which meaning is constantly being transferred from one signifier to another and can never be absolutely possessed.
    “To understand a message is to decode it. Language is a code. But every decoding is another encoding. If you say something to me I check that I have understood your message by saying it back to you in my own words, that is, different words from the ones you used, for if I repeat your own words exactly you will doubt whether I have really understood you. But if I use my words it follows that I have changed your meaning, however slightly; and even if I were, deviantly, to indicate my comprehension by repeating back to you your own unaltered words, that is no guarantee that I have duplicated your meaning in my head, because I bring a different experience of language, literature, and non-verbal reality to those words, therefore they mean something different